Whowatch Part 6
Sean: So here we are, back to watching Doctor Who. But this time, I’ve invited another guest. Say hello to Veronica Jane, who is not just here because I feel guilty for making her suffer through Before Watchmen: Rorschach.
Veronica: Say what you will about Before Watchmen, I made more money out of it than I ever made out of Doctor Who and, really, isn’t that what engaging with art is all about?
Sean: According to Bob Kane, yes. As with all our new guests, we begin by asking a rather simple question: How did you get into Doctor Who?
V: Doctor Who, much like Star Wars, is one of those things I have no memory of learning about, it just always existed in some form in my mind (even if that form was “the cheap sci-fi show with the goofy Daleks”). My actual “let’s see what this is all about then” was when I was in high school and the ABC started showing Doctor Who from the very beginning. So yes, my actual first Doctor Who was the first Doctor Who; weird jokes about the metric system and all. I watched about three episodes and then got my first ever job which meant I wouldn’t be home to watch every episode and, seeing as it was all serialised, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the plot. And while I was enjoying it I wasn’t enjoying it enough to bother setting the VCR to tape what I missed or anything. A couple years later the reboot happened and I watched two episodes, enjoyed them, and then stopped watching them for…no particular reason I can remember? Eventually at uni I started dating a girl who was well into NewWho and she leant me the first season DVDs and I was fully in the tank after that. I don’t remember exactly when that was but I was definitely watching the Specials as they aired. I stuck with Who up until the Cpaldi era where, I am ashamed to say, I found almost every episode very boring and I left the show behind until I ended up with a bunch of Twitter mutuals who would not stop going on about amazing the Capaldi seasons actually were and I got dragged back into the whole thing again. Also paragraph breaks are for cowards.
David: Speaking of origins, Sean had us go this time around before starting Series Four to Genesis, with The Doctor assigned to prevent the creation of the Daleks in what I guess is the first time I’ve seen another Time Lord besides The Master, who’s basically framed like a CIA handler trying to get Stallone back for one last mission when he’s left that life behind, dammit.
Sean: [Aside] I’m not telling him.
V: I have to say, coming at this from the perspective of NewWho and the Doctor’s many “You can’t change the past, it’s against the Time Laws! My people would have stopped all this time nonsense!” speeches it’s very jarring to learn that apparently Time Lords couldn’t care less about the sanctity of the time line or whatever…including the Doctor himself.
Sean: The thing you come to understand about the Time Lords as the series goes on is that they will only stop time nonsense when it benefits them to stop time nonsense. To use one of Grant Morrison’s contributions to Doctor Who, The World Shapers, the Time Lords prevent Doctor Who from stopping the Genesis of the Cybermen on Planet 14 because, after five million years of “evil and bloodshed,” the Cybermen will have become “The most peace-loving and advanced race in the universe… They will lead us into a new era of understanding.” Doctor Who is too young to understand these adult matters.
V: Oh, is that where the Doctor gets his fully bananas “Eh, I’m sure some good will come of these genocidal murder robots, who I know for a fact will kill countless billions of people, eventually” take at the end of this story from?
David: Yeah the thing about Genesis is that with one important exception its takes on fascism are generally completely insane, as evidenced by how the plot revolves around Hitler finally taking the exactly one step too far that makes all the other Nazis go “now wait a second, this is TOO MUCH, fella”.
V: I was going to ask if the Kaleds were supposed to be Nazis because, apart from the unifroms, they sure don’t actually seem that Nazi-ish
Sean: With Terry Nation, always assume that he is an utter hack. His conception of Nazis is… Red Skull. And Genesis of the Daleks is, ultimately, providing us with a raving supervillain to prevent us from having to listen to the interminable nature of Dalek Poetry.
David: FUCKIN’ DAVROS. The rest of this? With due respect to its old school charm, throw it in the bin. But Davros is amazing. Absolutely understand why they apparently keep bringing him back, and he’s the one part of this that completely landed for me. A ‘sensible’ head fascist who knows exactly the bare minimum amount he needs to play to liberal sympathies in order to endlessly toe the line, until the moment that’s no longer necessary and he can expose his true nature as a squealing petulant childish freak who would personally murder everything in the universe just to prove he could, and still can’t conceive something created in his image would have the same outlook. Note-perfect.
Sean: Perhaps the most chilling thing about Davros is how devoted he is to monstrosity. How much he wants to be the sort of guy who created the Daleks. He is the man who not only voted for the leopards eating people’s faces party, but he also was a founding member. That the serial ends with him screaming, “But I didn’t think they would eat my face” is perfect.
V: I love any villain that can only communicate in hysterical screaming but I’m still bummed to learn that my understand of the Dalek origin as “A fascist society that turned themselves slowly into literal monsters over the generations” is actually just “Doctor Doom made them overnight” and no one else in society was involved.
Sean: Again, Terry Nation. If you want nuanced depictions of society collapsing into fascist rhetoric with Daleks involved, The Power of the Daleks is your best bet. (Sadly, we won’t be watching that one because SOMEBODY thought fire was a good place to store celluloid.)
V: Absolutely love that the actor clearly cannot see a thing though
I would also like to say, and I don’t know if this is just what ClassicWho is like or if this is a Terry Nation thing (who I am quickly learning sucks eggs) good god this was a three issue comic book story stretched out to six issues for the trade. What was y’alls favourite ‘cliffhanger’? Mine was when Sarah Jane fell off the scaffolding only to land on another platform three feet down.
David: That was a remarkable cop-out but I don’t think you can beat “Maybe, just maybe, The Doctor will undo the entire television series you’ve been watching at the start of the next episode.”
V: The Doctor: Can I truly commint genocide against the murder robots? No. I can’t!
*the next episode* Oh wait, yes I can.
Sean: It’s both Nation and Classic Who. There are times, especially in the Colin Baker era, where they’re padding things out. In fact, one of the reasons why the sonic screwdriver was created was because they wanted to prevent writers from being lazy. Many scripts from the Hartnell and Troughton years had scenes where Doctor Who was locked up in a cell for an entire episode that the sonic could resolve in an instant. These scenes often resulted in massive padding and rarely added anything to the story.
Nation was the second writer on Doctor Who, and he was, as I’ve said before, the Bob Kane of Doctor Who. What makes the Davros scenes sparkle the way they do is the hard work of the script editor at the time, Robert Holmes, the Frank Miller of Doctor Who.
V: Davros is the Emperor Palpatine of this Rise of Skywalker of a story arc.
Sean: We both know this isn’t the Rise of Skywalker of Doctor Who. We know what David has chosen to suffer through.
V: Does anyone else have anything to say about Genesis or shall we move onto the thing I literally forgot existed until I checked my notes?
Sean: Quite right, let’s talk about Steven Moffat and David Tennant being massive Fifth Doctor Stans for six minutes.
David: It would have been interminable drudgery for an episode and is totally perfect for a 6-minute short that I seem to recall was done for charity? “You were my Doctor” is a line I’m not…a hundred percent sure whether the actual show could get away with even at its corniest, but this skirts the boundary just enough that it got me grinning like a loon when I’ve never even seen this guy before.
V: Conversely: I despised it. Of course, if they did this exact same thing but with Peter Capaldi instead of a Doctor I’ve never watched an episode of I probably would have gotten misty eyed so who am I to talk.
Sean: The Fifth Doctor is… not my favorite Doctor. I don’t get misty eyed at this. And yet, I find it to be quite charming, though more so in the way old Alan Moore Future Shocks are where there’s a clever twist you can see the mechanics of going through.
And yes, this was done to help Children in Need. For years, Doctor Who has been doing little shorts like this to help the organization and others like it. Indeed, we will be talking about one more of these at a later point… alongside a good friend of ours.
V: Can I say something that will cause you both to riot and burn the whole document down?
Sean: David likes Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks. Go ahead.
V: 1) David is 100% correct to like those episodes 2) This was that tie-in story you get during an event comic where the Teen Titans stand around tugging each others’ dicks about how great they are.
David: I don’t agree but only because this felt more ‘bringing back an old post-Crisis pre-Zero Hour iteration of a character so they can tug each others’ dicks’.
V: Also people actually like this character.
Sean: So it’s a Convergence tie-in?
V: Yes…except there isn’t a weird tacked on bit where 10 and 5 team up to fight, I don’t know, the steampunk Doctor or some nonsense.
Veronica has just remembered that the steam punk Doctor is a thing that exists
Sean: Spoilers.
V: Everyone imagine Sean is saying that in a flirtatious tone.
Sean: Spoilers.
David: After that was another one of the handful of episodes I in fact saw prior to embarking on this series in Voyage of the Damned, which is as quintessentially Who as it gets for me. Pretty much all my favorite kinds of stuff for the show to do here.
V: Watching this episode all I could think over and over was “Wow, Davis is so god damn good at introducing some stock characters and making you care about them very quickly”. That seems like an easy skill and yet gestures at every Chibnall episode
Sean: If we’re going to snark at what I previously referred to as the JSA era of Doctor Who but now–upon having to watch the finale for someone else’s roundtable–realize is actually the Titans era of Doctor Who, we’ll be here all night.
V: I never think about this one because, setting aside, it never sticks in my mind as a Christmas episode but I think David is right, it might be one of the best ‘standard’ episodes of Doctor Who.
Also it introduces the best character in all of Doctor Who.
Sean: Ah yes, Wilfred Mott. Intended only to be a one-off cameo for the star of Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. Bernard Cribbins was added to the show proper because of the untimely death of actor Howard Attfield shortly after filming scenes for Partners in Crime. In turn, Wilfred Mott would become the single most important character in the entirety of Davies era Who and an absolutely charming presence, even in the lesser stories he might appear in.
V: I guess that’s where Donna got those “the guest star so good she’s going to become a regular” genes from
Speaking of guest stars, I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to Australian Nation Treasure Kylie Minogue
Sean: An interesting thing about Minogue–aside from being essentially the equivalent of getting Britney Spears or Billie Piper to appear in Doctor Who–was that, in the early 2000s, she was in this photograph:
On the bottom left corner of the picture, you can see a copy of the Eighth Doctor Who novel, Camera Obscura, an extremely brilliant novel from one of the more underrated writers of the series from an era that can be best compared to the late Rebirth era of DC Comics.
V: I have just now learnt that Billie Piper was a big name pre-Doctor Who
David: The difficult thing about a platonic ideal Doctor Who episode is that there’s not a ton to discuss, since it’s just regular Doctor Who type stuff, but better.
V: Max Capricorn is incredible and “Sorry, I only travel with hot babes” is one of the funniest lines in the entire show.
Sean: Though it doesn’t hold a candle to Doctor Who being carried through the sinking Titanic by a pair of robot angels.
If I’m being honest, that’s how I feel about the majority of the first half of Series 4: It’s regular Doctor Who stuff, but better. Everyone is doing great work here and I don’t have too many notes. Though that might be more the presence of Donna Noble than anything else.
V: The reason I chose to guest on season 4 was that, in my opinion, it has the best quality average of any season. There are seasons I love more than this, but they all have an absolute turd of a two-parter in the middle of them. (Note: I actually prefer the back half of season 4 but I didn’t want to embarrass myself more than necessary by having dumb dumb thoughts on some of my favourite episodes in the whole show.)
Actually there is one thing I want to specifically talk about but only because no one has discuss dit yet: Murray Gold is the real hero of this show
Sean: Murray Gold, the composer of Doctor Who for its first ten series, is a tour de force in a show that had Dudly Simpson and Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire in its pocket at one point or another. There’s a sense of grandeur and awe to his work that feels at home in superhero fiction. At the same time though, he can threaten to have an almost Johnsian Literalism to his music.
V: Come on, it’s not like he’s Danny Elfman including violins in his Catwoman theme because it sounds like meowing or anything.
Sean: No, but there are times when it’s clear he’s telling you the emotion you’re supposed to be feeling when you can see it on screen. When it works, it’s operatic beauty on par with none. When it doesn’t, it’s extremely crass and laughable.
David: Speaking of under discussed elements before moving on: I imagine many would be annoyed by Doctor Who reusing the same sets of underground tunnels and such to run through over and over again, but I’m endlessly charmed. I like to imagine Doctor Who being filmed on a Disney World-type campus, acres of devoted space for each of the eight or so places the infinity of space and time can funnel you into to go have playground antics in to save the universe.
Sean: David, Doctor Who is famous for using the exact rock quarry for every single planet in the classic era to the point where Douglas Adams made a joke about it in his first episode as script editor. (A position that pissed Terry Nation off so much that he never wrote for Doctor Who after that.)
David: Beautiful.
V: I am a big Stargate SG-1 fan, the show where every planet is the same Vancouver forest, so I find Doctor Who’s range of sets very impressive by comparison..
Sean: Now then. Donna’s back! [Clangs pots] Donna’s back! [Clangs pots] Donna’s back! [Clangs pots] Donna’s back! [Clangs pots] Donna’s back!
V: Everyone shut up! It’s time to talk about Donna!
Besides my “season 4 is the best season on average,” the other reason I am here is to talk about Donna, the Actual Best Companion. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a breath of fresh air it was, after three seasons of girls of questionable age gushing over this nonacentenarian (that’s definitely not the right word) to have a companion who, will still recognising his actual talents, has no time for his self aggrandizing bullshit. Donna is the Shania Twain of companions.
Sean: Their dynamic beyond Donna not taking Doctor Who’s bullshit is also charming. They spend the majority of Partners in Crime investigating the same mystery about killer babies made of fat only to realize that they’re both there. And the scene where they silently realize they’re both there is amazing. Just this comedy bit of two people who haven’t seen each other in years reuniting and immediately getting on. Two great comedic forces being allowed to be their best and doing brilliant work.
In short, easily my third favorite New Series companion.
David: I got to do all my gushing about Donna when Justin was on, but yes, easily the best thus far and I could imagine not to be surpassed. Love that her arc was basically ‘okay being inspired is nice and all but the real world is boring, shit I should’ve gone and had Doctor Who adventures.’
V: No shade to the other companions but you can really tell which one made her living as a comedian.
Also, I find it incredibly important that she isn’t Hot. Not that Catherine Tate isn’t attractive, but she’s ‘person you would actually see on the street’ attractive, she’s not the TV Celebrity Attractive of every other companion this show has had and, quite frankly, will have. She’s also not the prophesied Bad Wolf or the genius doctor, she’s just a temp from Chisick who is, let’s be honest, kind of a shitty person who has a brief encounter with a higher power (I was going to make a joke about how eye rolling that analogy is but the Doctor did just get flown around by angels on Christmas) and it completely changes her life…but also it doesn't because one event rarely actually changes your life. You can go see the world but at the end of the day you still have to go home and get a job and deal with your terrible mum (who is absolutely the queen of Terrible Davis Mum’s).
Sean: Honestly, the only terrible Davies mom who works for me as a character was the one from It’s a Sin. The rest are a bit too… needy. And Jackie Tyler did nothing wrong.
V: Jackie is a very different character when you watch her at 35 compared to how you watched her at 20. Justice for Jackie. No justice for Mickey who actually sucks.
David: Jackie did nothing wrong, ever. Mickey…okay Mickey’s a drag but he increasingly becomes understandable, if only in how much you come to sympathize that Rose is such a shitty girlfriend that he’s basically forced to self-actualize.
V: And Mickey never even found out about the extremely alarming age gap the show never wants you to think about.
David: Fires of Pompeii is manifold weird, between the first thing Donna has to do as a companion is help the Doctor trigger a historical massacre, and also that Peter Capaldi is here being Not Doctor Who, which I understand will be addressed. Still, a terrific episode with a terrific ending and exactly the kind of callout of the Doctor’s shit promised by the premise of having her onboard full-time.
Sean: There was also someone else in that episode who will be making a major appearance later in the show: Karren Gillen. She will not be explained. Doctor Who does that a lot.
V: Speaking as a Scot I love that they had to cast two Romans and their immediate thought was “Of course, get the whitest people on the planet!”
It does hit really weird after Genesis of the Daleks though. I have to imagine there’s some episode I haven’t seen where the Doctor cavalierly changes the past and it goes baaaaaaaaaad
Sean: Father’s Day aside, there’s the First Doctor story The Aztecs, which has a lot of problems from a modern perspective, but also includes some fantastic lines and bits like “You can't rewrite history. Not one line!” and “Yes, I made some cocoa and got engaged.” There’s also the character of the Meddling Monk, who frequently changes time.
However this is part and parcel of one of the limitations of Doctor Who: it can never be as leftist as fans want it to be.
David: “Thank you Doctor, thank you! Happy Christmas!”
Sean: The Queen was a massive Doctor Who fan. Much to Chris Eccelston’s chagrin.
There’s never going to be a story where Doctor Who questions the nature of history as anything other than the way things are. There will never be a story where Doctor Who overthrows Adolf Hitler or stops the English’s colonialist behavior in India or saves Noor Inayat Khan from being executed in a concentration camp. The best Doctor Who can do is sci-fi stories around those ideas. At its best, Doctor Who is fantastic, brilliant, and full of stories that can push worthwhile ideas. At its worst, it’s abjectly fascist and colonialistic.
V: Of course the Doctor can’t overthrow Hitler, Sean. If he did that it would cause a paradox and then Time Pterodactyls would come and eat everyone
Also this all feels like a conversation for season six when we learn who the Doctor (noted JK Rowling fan) considers a close personal friend.
Sean: Or, to use a classic era story, he’s friendly with Chairman Mao and was a Tory throughout his time working for UNIT.
David: Less a fix than an exacerbation of the issue, but I personally like to imagine The Doctor is actually absolutely terrible when it comes to human history beyond a collection of clever factoids they’ve memorized to deploy and they have zero idea what they’re signing off on here. We’re lucky they’ve pieced together the Nazis were a bad thing and most of the time they’re probably thinking “Like Daleks but without that terrifying battle cry.”
V: “Yes, sorry I don’t know what the Civil Rights Movement is, Donna. I had 60,000 other planetary histories to learn. Why don’t you tell me all about who L’tekura of Sartax is and I’ll judge your ignorance, hmmmm?”. Of course that would be more believable if he ever hung out with anyone other than Earth humans
Sean: Whereas when it comes to aliens, Doctor Who is perfectly fine with working with a rebellion to overthrow slavery, as we see in Planet of the Ood.
V: The Doctor: a man who will very quickly forget about that slave species he met. He’ll get around to freeing them like I’ll get around to changing the lightbulb over the stove.
David: I know I already talked about the sets but I wanted to mention the snow-covered factory in Planet of the Ood gave me huge Playstation 1 vibes, and I don’t know exactly what I mean by that but I do mean it as a compliment. Anyway it was great, and Donna’s liberalism failing the instant shit got real and resorting to barking orders at the Ood to try to get them to back off after her ‘I’m not one of THEM’ spiel maybe goes harder than the writers necessarily even realized.
V: I absolutely love the horror she goes through at realising that, actually, the wonder of space is sometimes pretty awful and reacts by just wanting to go home and forget it ever happened. Some very good stuff from Tate.
Again, Donna is the companion who has a selfish first reaction and takes a bit to work up to ‘Selflessly do the right thing’ and not to be all “Yes! Gritty realism!” but I do love how she’s the most human of the companions and the least…perfect
Sean: Do we have anything to say about the first two parts of the inexplicable Martha Jones trilogy or can we move on to the weirder one?
V: Martha Jones joining UNIT is like Harry Potter becoming an auror and it makes no sense and I hate it.
David: And the show seems to…know it? But goes with it anyway???
V: I do actually enjoy this two-parter but that’s only because 1) I love this shitty kid doing an Elon Musk 15 years early and 2) I LOVE Sontarans which is extremely weird because I L O A T H E warrior societies. Spartans, vikings, Mandalorians, hate ‘em all. “Hoo rah, we’re the big tough muscle men. Honour! Glory! Death in battle!” Absolutely despise it but when little potato men are doing it I can’t stop grinning
Also this episode has a high Wilfred ratio which is always welcome.
David: Getting Ezra Miller to play an Elon Musk who naturally finds way more commonality with military dictatorships than his nominal nerd peers way before either was a thing is the most galaxy-brained take Who has had to offer to date.
Veronica: David, please, I’m drinking water here. You can’t just tell me Ezra Miller was in this episode when I’m mid-sip
Sean: Would you honestly be that surprised if they were? There are so many people who will be in Doctor Who. Including a popular superhero. And a love interest of a superhero.
I love the Sontarans. They are such a dumb, dumb idea that are also kinda fucked up in the best way. The best takes on the Sontarans are able to balance the core paradox at the heart of them. The worst emphasize one over the other (usually the “We’re serious business who will conquer the galaxy” part.)
V: I love that their only weakness is ‘being hit on the back of the head very hard’ just like how J'onn J'onzz only weakness is ‘being set on fire’
Sean: Well, since there’s not much else to talk about on the Sontaran two parter, I guess we have to talk about The Daughter of Doctor Who.
V: My personal journey with this one “Wow, I hate this episode, there is no LORE about the Doctor’s actual daughter which I know is a real thing because Susan is the only thing I remember from the three episodes of Classic Who I saw” when I first watched, to “Hey, this episode is actually fun and I like it” when I watched it last year, to “No, wait, this episode kind of sucks and is making me question if season 4 is actually good” when I watched it last week
Sean: So fun fact. The daughter of Doctor Who is played by Georgia Moffett. Prior to appearing in the New Series, she had a massive role within the Classic series: She’s the reason Peter Davison left the show. Specifically, she was born on December 25, 1984 to Sandra Dickinson and Peter Davison. In the time since appearing on Doctor Who, she has been closely tied to the show, considering she married David Tennant. This episode, then, is their meet cute.
David: That’s…that’s so much to process.
Sean: Also their son played the child version of Aegon Targaryen on House of the Dragon with Matt Smith.
V: While you’re dropping Fun Facts, do you have one that explains why Martha is in this episode seeing as a) she does nothing b) doesn’t want to be there in character and c) is immediately separated from the Doctor and Donna like she wasn’t originally in the script and they had to shove her in at the last minute?
Sean: Sadly, my source on this one decided to go to Thought Bubble this year and forgot her copy of About Time. Google is giving me absolutely nothing nor is the TARDIS Wiki, a wiki notable for having an article on every single piece of Doctor Who minutia, except for the existence of Queer people.
David: I dunno, I liked this one just fine, a dopey little sci-fi premise that like Impossible Planet/Satan Pit drops in The Biggest Thing You Could Do With Doctor Who as seasoning and casually deals with it in a single standalone story.
Sean: It’s ok. Never had reason to revisit it. Some people hate it for the fact that THE BIGGEST THING YOU COULD DO WITH DOCTOR WHO isn’t treated with more gravitas. And it’s a tad bit… silly? Like 90s action film silly as opposed to Doctor Who silly.
V: I hate that I can tell without even googling it that Jenny has an entire spin-off series of audio book adventures…because every single bit of undetailed minutiae seems to have a spin-off series of audio book adventures
Sean: That they waited until 2018 shows some restraint, I guess. That’s the true JSA era of Doctor Who: Post-New Series Big Finish.
V: I am getting flashbacks to my teen years spent reading books explaining how Han Solo got that red stripe on his pants.
(It’s a Corellian Blood Stripe he was awarded for saving some orphans if you must know.)
I love the sci-fi part of the episode but I…struggle...with the rah rah girl power of it all
David: This is maybe the one episode of this Series thus far I have a real thought on - I’ve been hanging back a bit this time around without a ton coming to mind, but I have a coherent take that’s formed over this roundtable.
I’ve made the Batman and Robin comparison in the past with The Doctor and the companions, and one fair one is that there’s a MUCH better case to be made that The Doctor only breaks their partners worse than whatever state they found them in than is the case with the Robins. Those kids just about always start in a lousy place and become high-flying superheroes who visit their aunts and uncles on the moon. Rose abandons everyone around her before being stranded with them, Martha changes from doctor to soldier, and again, the first thing Donna does is aid in a genocide. The dream goes to hell with each and every one of them as hanging around this person actively makes them worse people.
Jenny meanwhile - looking every bit the archetypal companion - starts from a position of seeming doom, a soldier who’s in theory the antithesis of everything The Doctor stands for (even as she points out he’s entirely full of shit on that front) and clearly never gonna stick around from a real-world basis…but she hangs around him JUST long enough to be shown a better way of doing things, and heads off into an endless expanse of adventures all her own rather than being sucked into the vortex of her dad’s bullshit.
Sean: [Aside] I’m not telling him.
Also, the only reason she lived at the end was because Steven Moffat pointed out that the original ending of Jenny dying was a bit crap.
V: Final thoughts on season 4.1: I maintain that this is still some of the best Doctor Who on average. Is there a Blink in here? No, but also there wasn’t a Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel. It is the fourth season of a good show where everyone knows what they’re doing by now and are doing it very well.
I’m really struggling to come up with anything meaningful to say here because, well, it feels like talking about Usagi Yojimbo or Hellboy at this point. They’re good stories from a series that has been doing good stories for a while now but there’s nothing particularly incredible or terrible about these ones to say.
We can all only hope to have someone in our lives as loving and supporting as Wilfred Mott is
A NOTE ABOUT AGATHA
Hi, Sean here. So, you might have noticed we didn’t talk about one of the stories that was previewed in the Next Time segment. That’s because, as has been mentioned, I didn’t want David to have to watch the Gareth Roberts episodes. So I initially gave him a list of episodes that included no Gareth Roberts stories except for one. When David informed me of his intention to watch all of the New Series and not just the bits that are ‘good’ and not written by evil people, I had also come up with the idea to give David some surprises. As such, I can’t send him an updated list. In the future, such technical issues should not happen since Roberts episodes are in-between rather at the end. We will be covering his story, The Unicorn and the Wasp next time.
Veronica: I am giving everyone Special Trans Woman Permission™ to enjoy the Garth episodes. Yes, even the one with the talk show host everyone hates.
Sean: Spoilers.
Next Time: Niggles aside, we'd better look in the library. Donna Noble has been saved. Molto Bene. Spare him his life from this monstrosity! I am so sorry.